What I Am Reading: "Hidden Cities: A Memoir of Urban Exploration" by Moses Gates

I hope that this isn't the last urban exploration book I read, but it is the last one I can read right now. The shelf of books explicitly (and not just incidentally) about urban exploration isn't very large; you can tell because the Amazon links are very incestuous, and lead back to the same few books. I have read those other books (Access All Areas, Explore Everything: The Place-Hacker's Guide to the City, and the Burglar's Guide to the City), plus some lesser-known ones (The Urban Adventure Handbook, Invisible Frontier). True, I haven't read The Night Climbers of Cambridge, but I feel reasonably confident in saying that I have covered most of the printed canon of the urban exploration subculture, and even corresponded with some of its creators.

As any fule kno, I briefly and poorly wrote a column for Spark and Fizz about urban exploration zines. During this reasonably deep dive into the history of the subculture, I familiarized myself with the books and websites that existed alongside those zines. I read most of them at the time or within the subsequent year or so, but I purposefully avoided Hidden Cities. This was partially due to burnout, and partially because the reviews on Amazon told me that it was a little bit onanistic. However, shortly after reading Burglar's Guide last year and rekindling my interest in the topic, I had a bit of an epiphany: I always say that I engage more with urban exploration narratives than with urban exploration photography, of which there is a copious amount and which always provokes my jealousy more keenly. Well, there was an urban exploration narrative sitting right there in the open that I had studiously avoided for years. Why not put my money where my mouth was?

So, I read it. Moses Gates, an urban planner by trade, was also a prolific urban explorer in his early 30s, around the middle-aughts. The early part of the book can be summarized by a small, four-cell table. I can't make a table in squarespace, but there were high locations and there were deep locations, and they were either in Paris or in New York. Gates' home city makes many appearances underground in the subway system, and from on high at the tops of bridges and old observation decks of skyscrapers. He finds these in old guidebooks, showing the city as it was seen at the time, without the benefit of hindsight. Paris, a city with much more casual access to structures, features climbs of cathedrals (including the tragically wooden Notre-Dame) and trips down into the famous catacombs. Beyond those two cities though, many figures and even exploits from my old UrbEx readings made appearances, as Gates moved in familiar circles. These included Dsankt and Siologen, members of the Cave Clan (Australian drain explorers) to Steve Duncan, occasional partner with the (questionable in my opinion) Jinx group of explorers, who is Gates' close friend. Urban exploration clearly did/does exist as a subculture, a real network and not just a theorized one.

Gates tells stories of travel to other European cities, backpacking through South America, and something of a last hurrah exploring in Russia. He really does have an impressive commitment to the practice of urban exploration, structuring his life around it at the time. Unlike many of his partners, his work is non-photographic; fueled somewhat by competition, they ultimately are driven simply by the prospect of the experience. He especially likes the tops of bridges, where one is as literally physically isolated as one can get in a metropolis yet with a complete spiritual connection to the city on display. He tries to think and write holistically about how people interact with urban spaces, and one topic that comes up is public access. Beyond the recounting of exploits, Gates does some theorizing. One item is the idea of an access curve, whereby a remote location goes through four phases of discovery, with differing access. Accessibility is middlingly-high during the first phase, where an obscure place is welcome to anyone eccentric enough to seek it out, and owners are happy to show it off to the small minority interested in it. Access increases even more in the second phase, where the location has become more popular, to the point where some level of infrastructure is set up to facilitate access. However, the location is still niche enough that crowds are not overwhelming. A tipping point is reached in phase three, and access craters when everyone wants to visit a place, and capacity is filled to the point that there are no consequences for turning people away. Finally, in stage four, a place is monetized, and access either jumps again if the point is to move many people through for cheap, or stays low if the point is to host a few people in luxury.

One of the most interesting explorations in the book is when Moses and his comrades explore an underground network in Odessa, Ukraine. He is fresh off a visit to his only surviving Jewish relatives in Poland, and writes of how he kept in the back of his mind an optimism that urban explorers he might meet could be part of the Jewish diaspora, as he is. However, there is a growing realization that, especially in Eastern Europe, they might be neo-Nazis as well. In Odessa, he comes across an allegedly authentic swastika on the wall from when the underground complex was partially used by Nazi occupiers. He says:

This carving is one of the rarest things a person could find... [m]uch of the purpose, the excitement, in urban exploration is finding this kind of thing, a historical remnant preserved because of the remoteness and inaccessibility of the location... My emotions are telling me differently, but my head says I should leave it as it is, leave it for others to experience, to have their own thoughts and feelings upon its discovery... And if I were someone different, had a different family with a different history, I would have likely heeded this thought and left it alone. And if another, different person had made this choice, I would have understood, made no judgements. But I'm not a different person. To me, these people aren't a vague historical ideology, just a symbol and an epithet now. All I can think of when I look at the carving in the stone is that whoever put it there wanted to murder my whole family. I pick up a piece of glass, dig it into the soft limestone, and start to hack away... [a]fter a few moments, one of the Ukrainians, a gruff black-haired man who doesn't speak English, gets up, takes out his pocketknife, and joins me in my erasure. (p. 251-2)

It is interesting to see theory come up against harsh reality in this way. Gates has a grounded perspective, on this occasion and on others when he decries “ruin porn” compared to the reuse of buildings and space.

Gates has many opportunities to talk about how different cities lead to different urban exploration, and have different urban exploration histories. This takes the form of not just climbing, draining, tunnel running, and abandoned buildings, but also live-site urban exploration, and elements of social engineering. Naples, for example, is tight-knit enough not to give out its secrets easily; Russia had a heyday of exploration of old Soviet sites in the Yeltsen years, but security is back on now. Tunis is largely enclosed and rooftop-based; Sweden is cold. He was part of a trip in London that led to an extensive effort to explore the entire London underground. Other parts of the book are really more backpacking travelogues, especially his recollections of South America, but they include surveys of the urban landscape. He also has an interesting disagreement with New York graffiti artists, who try to limit access to a space in order to have an underground art show (not considering his own needs of the space). Graffiti is a main subject in the latter part of the book, when Gates has traded globetrotting for New York, where the authorities try to exert social control of liminal spaces.

This book is about a decade old now, but it made me optimistic about urban exploration. Other, older books note the difficulties of the post-9/11 security state, and the continuing threat of gentrification, but this one ends on a positive note, though it does not have any kind of sweeping predictions to make in either direction. I was glad I read it after all. I can see why some of the reviews thought it was a bit bro-y, with discussion of sexual exploits and such (including a cringe-worthy reference to The Game); but I thought Gates was a fairly self-aware writer, and was willing to portray himself as awkward or frightened when necessary. The book ends with Gates still exploring, despite transitioning his life out of an UrbEx focus, mainly at home in New York. I don't know what he has been up to since then, but I hope he is still at it. I also hope my Urban Exploration reading quest isn't over.